Author: Stephen Bates (@stepbates)

Introduction

Flash Memory Summit just wrapped up for 2015 and it was an #awesome one for PMC. The PMC team pulled out all the stops to cement our position as the enabler for performance storage solutions. Here is my list of top five #awesome moments for PMC at FMS 2015.

#1. Introducing Switchtec

We launched our Switchtec product at FMS. Switchtec is a cutting-edge family of PCIe Gen3 switches with an enhanced feature set to address performance storage solutions. It is worth noting that one week after FMS, we demonstrated the same product in Intel’s Rack-Scale Architecture demo at Intel Developer Forum 2015.

#2.  Successful Launch of our Next-Gen Flashtec Contollers

We launched our latest generation of Flashtec NVM Express SSD controllers and won a Tom’s ITPro Award! The new generation provides faster DRAM and NVM interfaces, improved error correction for the latest NAND and better performance in the same power envelope.

#3. We Came, We Saw. We Demo’d

We had some fantastic demos.

• Our new Flashtec controller with Toshiba TSV-enabled NAND, showing the same performance as non-TSV for ~5W less power.
• Our new Flashtec controller delivering over 1.1M 4K random read IOPS using Micron 20nm NAND.

• Our new Switchtec product providing PCIe connectivity between a host CPU and five NVMe SSDs from three different vendors.

• Our Switchtec and Flashtec NVRAM coupled with an RDMA capable ConnectX3-Pro from Mellanox showcasing NVMe over RDMA and NVMe PeerDirect, adding distance and scale to the NVMe protocol.

#4.  Our Customer Showcase

We showcased many of our customers’ complete SSDs built around Flashtec technology, including drives from @HGST, @Memblaze, @OCZ,  @Radian Memory (who won a Best of Show award) & @SK Telecom.

# 5.  We Stood Behind the Podium – a lot!

We presented both technical tracks, and a keynote on “Breaking Down the Barriers to PCIe SSD Adoption” by Derek Dicker,VP of the Performance Solutions Group at PMC.  The technical tracks covered a wide range of topics from controllers & flash technology, to LDPC & NAND issues, to the latest in NVMe & PCIe. Check out our presentations and a video of the keynote.

Conclusions

In a few short years PMC has emerged as a leader in the next-generation performance storage space. We are the only company able to provide a complete solution around PCIe with the combination of our Switchtec switches, Flashtec controllers and NVRAM cards. We continue to drive technology forward as we work with our partners and customers on topics like NVMe over Fabrics, next-generation NAND and NVM, improved media management and PCIe for storage connectivity. We look forward to seeing you at Flash Memory Summit 2016!